From the album Golden Age
This is a song about someone who's turned their own destruction into a performance they keep grading themselves on, asking not 'why does this keep happening' but 'am I doing this correctly.' She knows the pattern, names the violence explicitly, claims there's no hope left, then describes in future tense how it will all happen again. The certainty that he'll destroy her contradicts the claim that nothing in her heart is hoping he'll come back.
Leave the room half undressed, I'm saying prayers through a throttled neck / Come into the room and make me cry all over again
The throttled neck is present tense, happening now, not memory. Then she asks him back into the room to repeat it. Prayer language turns violence into ritual she's performing correctly.
Shed your knuckle velvet, torn on my teeth / When you're torn apart, you'll destroy me again
Knuckle velvet makes his fists sound soft, almost tender. She's describing her own teeth tearing his skin like that detail matters more than what his hands are doing to her throat. The aestheticizing is the whole problem.
You're such a child and you know it
She calls him childish for crying after a night alone, but the whole song is her crying over him. The accusation mirrors what she won't admit about herself. Neither of them can leave.
Nothing in my heart is hoping you'll come back / Too cold to know what I don't have without you
She claims no hope, then immediately admits she can't know herself without him. The future tense 'you'll destroy me again' assumes continuation. If there's really no hope, why is destruction still scheduled?
She knows exactly what's happening and describes it in clinical detail, but that knowledge doesn't produce departure or refusal. The song ends on an instrumental, not a resolution. Maybe because there isn't one when you've turned your own destruction into the only intimacy you know how to ask for.